Bronx New Deal Projects

Frank da Cruz, June 2014

Most recent update:
Tue Jul 28 16:30:32 2015

Imagine a time when millions of people were out of work and the
government, recognizing that Wall Street and the big banks and corporations
were the problem and not the solution, took the initiative and did what the
private sector would not do and created jobs for the unemployed: building
roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, levees, dams, aqueducts, water mains,
power houses, reservoirs, water filtration plants, power grids, airports,
sewage treatment plants, municipal buildings, libraries, post offices,
public housing, schools, colleges, universities, dormitories, athletic
fields, stadiums, auditoriums, coliseums, memorials, museums, clinics,
hospitals, laboratories, sanitariums, community centers, markets, zoos,
parks, playgrounds, recreation centers, swimming pools, bathhouses, beaches,
ports, piers, wharves, lighthouses, warehouses, grain elevators, hotels...
Even the United States Mint at San Francisco, the gold depository at Fort
Knox, and the Washington DC Mall: a legacy that we enjoy and depend upon to
this day without knowing how it all came to be. It was called the New Deal and it was
happening all over the United States on a scale inconceivable today. This
page shows only a few of the New Deal projects in just one part of
one city: Bronx, New York. What you see here is the living legacy of
a government that put economic justice and the public good before corporate
profits. The same thing is possible today, yet unthinkable. Why? And
what, therefore, will be the legacy of our generation?

The Willis Avenue Bridge

The New Deal Lives On

The New Deal's programs were on everyone's minds in the late 1930s. So many
people we knew had the misfortune to be out of work and on, what was then
called, home relief. For a father to have a job with the Works Progress
Administration, or WPA, repaving the many streets or building new projects in
The Bronx, was a stroke of good luck. With a steady income he could provide
clothes and food for his family, and further, had the dignity of saying that
he worked for what he got. Indeed those few years before the onset of the
Second World War, The Bronx seemed to be in a frenzy of construction...

A frenzy of construction indeed! In the Bronx we are surrounded by New Deal projects without
even knowing it. President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal designed, constructed, and/or paid
for a great many Bronx landmarks including the ones you see above,
plus numerous neighborhood post offices, public schools, and playgrounds,
countless murals (such
as these), sculptures, maps, surveys, renovations, and infrastructure
improvements all over the Bronx, including in the Botanical Garden and Zoo,
not to mention an ongoing schedule of public concerts, plays, puppet shows,
swimming lessons, and contests. I have a more complete list of
projects in this table.

But during the Depression the New Deal was so busy getting things done that
(as far as I know) it never got around to leaving behind a definitive and
comprehensive list of everything that all of the “alphabet soup”
New Deal agencies (WPA, PWA, CWA, NRA, REA, AAA, CCC, NYA, TVA, RFC,
TERA, FERA...) accomplished. Something that would demonstrate what could be
accomplished today if the government had a sense of history. Or decency.

In 2005 a
project was launched at the University of California at Berkeley to assemble
just such a compendium: The
Living New Deal. It's not an easy task because modern corporate
America has made considerable efforts to erase all memory of the New Deal.
In most cases the plaques
identifying New Deal projects have been removed or replaced or (in the
case NYC Parks Department, never existed at all), and many texts fail to
mention New Deal funding, design, or labor when discussing the many
landmarks that were, in fact, created by the New Deal.

For other New Deal projects in New York City, see this page
for Manhattan; this page for
Queens; this
one for Brooklyn; and this
one for Staten Island. It's an impressive list: LaGuardia Airport, the
Lincoln Tunnel, the Queens Midtown Tunnel, the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel,
Henry Hudson Parkway, East River Drive, Riverside Park, the Tavern On The
Green, and the 1939 World's Fair grounds to name a few. In
this page, I have compiled a list of
more than 500 New York City Parks Department projects that were carried out
with New Deal funding and/or labor in the five boroughs.